Thanks to half-baked online integration, one of Final Fantasy’s biggest spin-offs is not getting the excitement it deserves.
The Final Fantasy series has had many spin-offs and sidebars over the years, but Crystal Chronicles is certainly one of the biggest. Developed as a triumphant and exclusive return to Nintendo after the messy separation between FFs 6 and 7, it was something truly different: a multiplayer action-packed RPG with weird, unique and engaging mechanics.
Everything about Crystal Chronicles stood apart. While Final Fantasy was on a trend toward realism, Crystal Chronicles featured a simpler, characterful art style. It built a world defined by races made from classic RPG archetypes and colored it with a beautiful, international-aromatic musical score. The downside of the game was its complexity: for the full experience, you would need four Game Boy Advance machines and connect cables to connect them to your GameCube. It got complicated and expensive, and Crystal Chronicles became something of a joke.
Later releases took some of the FFCC’s unique ideas and put them into more accessible games on later Nintendo hardware, but the original still has a unique charm. That of course I was excited about then Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition was announced for Switch, PS4 and Mobile.
Crystal Chronicles is a natural candidate for a remaster. The art style should scale well, his ideas were probably ahead of his time, and the collaborative, multi-screen nature makes it perfect for online.
However, it did not work that way. Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition looks and feels great moment-by-moment. The core of the game, a collaborative RPG with a strong focus on battlefield positioning and party composition, ends well. The music is still a complete stand-out. It is a technically competent remaster that runs well. But all this is for nothing if the game is as difficult – if not more difficult – to play in a group than on GameCube. And do you know what? It kind of is.
For a start, local cooperation game in this game does not exist at all. This would not be so bad, and is kind of understandable based on how the game is structured. That’s fine, you say – I’ll jump online. Then the true extent of this total cock-up becomes clear.
Each Crystal Chronicles Remastered player has one storage file that governs all the characters they can create – up to eight in total. The conservation file is basically for your village and caravan – the characters just live there. If you continue, that’s saving you from cross-character.
That’s smart, but then you go online. When you play online with other players, only the world state of the host progresses. To give a brutal example, this means that if you play the entire FFCC Remastered with one dedicated group of four players, you must play each dungeon in the game four times to improve everyone’s world and their characters. Otherwise, it will just grow and change the world of the host, gaining access to new tools in their city for character progression, while the others will only get items and equipment for their problems.
Mirre, the coin that moves the story forward in Crystal Chronicles, is only assigned to the host. Normally, the host gets both world and character progression, while its party members only get character progression. It’s a mess.
Other elements of the remaster’s design seem to conspire to make multiplayer even less smooth. In this version, you can not currently exchange items with other players, except for the most basic consumables. Unlike the original, multiplayer is not possible in the hub, only dungeons – which makes certain city traffic busy-work more difficult.
A cumbersome friend code system is used on all platforms. You accept this as a necessary concession to enable platform multiplayer – but then you learn that these codes are region-exclusive, which means you can not play with anyone outside your own region.
Even moving from dungeon to dungeon is a mess. You can not just move on to the next dungeon after completing one – instead you should miss one lobby at the completed dungeon and then form a new one at the next. Who designed this? Someone who has never seen an online cooperative video game? A stranger?
The other option is of course to go it alone, but the whole point of the game is that Crystal Chronicles are not built for that; it is not a traditional Final Fantasy.
It’s a great shame. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles is a great game, and it created a fun little FF sub-series that deserves to come to life and grow. This remaster is skilled and well done in many ways … Until the moment comes where you have to group with other players. Perhaps the most important thing for this game, good multiplayer functionality, is completely wrong.
I want to be honest. There are bright spots in some parts of the execution here. Support for cross-play is always welcome. The free-to-play Lite version of the game, which allows a newcomer to visit the first three dungeons or join a friend with the full game for several more is clever.
But then there’s something ridiculous about each bright spot, such as launch day microtransactions that are almost as expensive as the base game, as ‘new’ dungeons for this release that, as it turns out, just reskins are from existing dungeons with more difficult enemy encounters. I would accept these things even if multiplayer was just a smooth experience though. It is not.
I honestly do not know what’s going on in Square Enix. Time and time again, the company respects its immense back catalog of industrial classics with dreadful harbors. Sometimes these problems are solved; sometimes they do not. It’s luck of the lottery.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition is yet another swing and a miss in this category. Hopefully it is one of those that are fixed; the game hidden behind this disastrous online implementation is definitely worth it.
This is a review in process. A final score will be given after further testing.
